Stronghold Gaming is a card, comic and video game shop in Sumter South Carolina that was established in Dec. 2011. In addition to housing Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh tournaments and judges, who are sactioned by Wizards of the Coast and Konami respectively, Stronghold recently formed its own fighting game team. Team Stronghold, as it were, consists of four players – Woodrow Pope (Sumter, SC), Rich Abisa (Sumter, SC), Keyon Johnson (Cola, SC) and Xavier Edwards (Cola, SC).

An event was recently held shortly after the team’s creation to introduce the store’s patrons to the fighting game division. Below are a few photos from the event. You can also visit Stronghold’s Facebook page for more information about the store.

Four South Carolina players made the trip all the way out to Columbus, OH for Seasons Beatings 4. Matt (U-Volt), Dwaine (Award Tour), Keyon (Keyon), and Justin (SonGohanX) have now returned home and from what I’ve been told so far, the experience has been epic. None of our players made it out of pools (each pool was a 32 player tournament where the winners advanced to the Semi/Finals tournament) in Street Fighter 4 but that isn’t a bad thing because the competition was top-notch including many pr0-class players.

BlazBlue is a game that South Carolina is pretty strong in, however, and Keyon is one of our top players. Keyon placed 9th out of 85 players, apparently barely losing the match that would have put him in top 8 by some sort of “fluke”. Justin also did pretty well, taking 33rd out of 85. Considering the level of competition, those results are something we can be proud of.

Aside from the tournament, they got to go to a real arcade! No, really! They do exist! They spent some of their down-time at the arcade playing Tekken 6, making people like myself who eagerly await it’s console release very jealous.

Matt was kind enough to take some pics from the event and publish them via Twitter. For those who didn’t follow his Twitter adventures, here are some of the pictures.

Here are some of the Empire Arcadia crew. Justin Wong and “ILoveU” Joe are in left-center.

Justin Wong, number one professional player in the US in multiple games, does his thing.

Yipes provides commentary. His commentary is some of the most popular in the national scene right now.

Here’s a shot of some of the many game setups at the venue. There were dozens of them.

The Seasons Beatings broadcast station. This is where commentary was done and live stream maintained.

Who would have thought that the rematch between Justin Wong (North America’s top Street Fighter 4 Champion) and Daigo “the Beast” Umehara (Japan’s top traveling Street Fighter 4 Champion and perennial dominator of Evo) would take place in Ohio? The rematch of one of the most exciting Street Fighter 4 Evo Finals to date (Evo 2009) will go down at Seasons Beatings 4: New Crack City being held in Columbus, OH this weekend (October 16-18). With undoubtedly the biggest main event imaginable taking place, it’s a no-brainer that this tournament will have astronomical amounts of hype and players from all over the country are making the pilgrimage to take part.

South Carolina has players who are making the trip as well. Justin (SonGohanX) from Myrtle Beach, currently South Carolina’s top-seeded Street Fighter 4 tournament player, is making the trip. Keyon, South Carolina’s top-seeded player in BlazBlue, is also going. Dwaine (AwardTour), with rock-solid Rufus skills, will be there. And Matt (U-Volt), winner of the D’Avino’s Street Fighter 4 Tournament in July, will represent all the nacho fans out there with his El Fuerte (and possibly pull out his Balrog if needed). Keyon, Matt, and Dwaine are all from the Columbia area. (To those who haven’t been to a tournament in a while, you may have missed it, but Columbia’s scene is for real and it’s players are dedicated. Columbia travels.)

Follow the Action:

There are several ways you can follow the action at Seasons Beatings 4. The tournament is providing (according to the official thread at SRK):

Live Stream of matches during the tournament

Commentary on featured matches by none other than Capcom legend Seth Killian

High quality recordings of featured matches to be uploaded for public viewing after the tournament’s conclusion

Matt (U-Volt) is also planning to provide some personal coverage of his experience at the event. He will be “tweeting” all weekend with updates and pics. Follow his Twitter at: http://twitter.com/UVolt

So, good luck to all of our players who are making the journey to participate in what is sure to be an epic tournament!

I’m the Blanka in this video. I was the very first match of the day on the “hype station” (an awesome setup with each player having their own monitor plus 2 wall monitors showing the action for all to see). I was quite nervous and missed a lot of stupid stuff. It also didn’t help that Kidd is an absolutely amazing Gen player! Once again, thanks for making me look like a complete scrub on YouTube, Corey! To add insult to injury, I got R.Kelly’d at the end! LOL!

AwardTour has an exceptionally good Rufus and usually places high in Columbia tourneys. What’s scary is that he’s continuing to improve. This match with Heavyweight is an outright war. I don’t think I’ve seen a Rufus/Gouken match this intense. Pay attention to AwardTour’s mixups. It’s pretty insane. The first 2 matches are pretty epic but AwardTour seemed to have dialed Heavyweight’s number in set 3.

For the first time since I started this blog for our rapidly growing community, I have some bad news. D’Avino’s Pizzeria, the venue that had been used for several tournaments over the last few months as well as the planned “Digital Slugfest” series of events, seems to have suddenly been closed down indefinately.

The only information I have recieved after trying to repeately contact them was via the business’ Facebook page.

From D’Avino’s Facebook: “We had a great past 2 years everyone, unfortunately some of you have already heard and we are now temorally closed for business. Thanks to all our friends who came by for a final pie. I’ll keep this facebook going to let you all know when and where we open up at, but it will not be in Dutch Square. Stay tuned, and thanks again Columbia.”

So, with no further information to go on, I am going to take all remaining D’Avino’s “Digital Slugfest” events off the tourney calendar. This series of events was organized by D’Avino’s. Myself and a few of the tourney regulars here in the Midlands only advised them and gave them ideas. Despite this, I apologize to anybody who was put out by this unfortunate turn of events. I personally feel like the D’Avino’s guys did not intend to scam anybody, as they are great guys who put a *tremendous* amount of thought and work into this event for no profit, and personally am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt for now. With luck D’Avino’s will re-open and we’ll get answers.

For now we will move on as a community, continue to grow, and continue to have fun playing.

Capcom has finally announced Super Street Fighter 4 for Playstation 3 and X-Box 360! It will have new characters, new online features, balance tweaks done for existing characters, new combat system additions, and more! If you are not playing Street Fighter 4 right now, you might want to start! You don’t want to be left behind the learning curve when the new addition comes out Spring of next year! Also, it might not be a good idea to sell your copy of SF4 until after the new one is released. The game’s producer promised some sort of reward for people who remain loyal and keep their copies. So get Hype, Street Fighter fans!!